Playing System Shock 2 back in the day, apart from the great atmosphere and gameplay, the soundtrack is something worth mentioning isn't it? It feels really in place, really appropriate sounding especially for certain tracks like the Command Ops and the MedSci ones, they seem put you into the action.

So I found out that GOG decides to release the game on here, and lo and behold, on the extras, FLAC soundtracks! I can't believe it! I've been an audiophile and seeing these FLAC files available to download, I was jumping around in my room in joy.

Gotta give GOG kudos for not only bringing the game along, but also some nice goodies.

They've been around for almost six years:
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=113469&p=1596438&viewfull=1#post1596438


I think GOG is being given enough credit as is ... ;)

Well I'll be damned.. I didn't know this at all..

The fact that it's been readily available for years aside, GoG included a FLAC soundtrack... hopefully they continue to do so

Agreed, it's the one thing I dislike about GOG. That when they include soundtracks and in theory could do FLAC versions, they don't. (I know that when they just provide the games music files ripped they can't)

System Shock 2 is the first game here with an extra that I won't download. Namely, the mp3 soundtrack.

When I have a FLAC, I can have an mp3 any time I want, in whatever quality I like. Or aac, or ogg vorbis, or any format in the future that is yet to debut. They should definitely provide lossless audio whenever possible.

Yeah I thought this was cool. I haven't downloaded it yet though. Has anyone measured it thoroughly? Just because it's FLAC doesn't mean it was encoded or converted well or that the source material used for encoding is any better than an mp3 file and then a store can advertise "We have FLAC files!" as a marketing stunt even though their files are junk that take up more space. Just because it's FLAC doesn't automatically mean it is quality, in my experience.

I probably don't have to worry about this though since it's been out for awhile and gog.com most likely just grabbed that instead of encoding their own.

Good point. I haven't listened to them yet, and I certainly can't claim that I can hear the difference to high quality lossy compression, so I ran them though auCDtect 0.8.2 and here's what it thinks:

Eric Brosius - 01 - Irrational Games Logo
CDDA with probability 43%

Eric Brosius - 02 - Med Sci 1
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 03 - Med Sci 2
CDDA with probability 99%

Eric Brosius - 04 - Engineering
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 05 - Ops 1
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 06 - Hydro 1
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 07 - Hydro 2
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 08 - Ops 2
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 09 - Ops 3
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 10 - Command 1
CDDA with probability 87%

Eric Brosius - 11 - Command 2
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 12 - Command 3
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 13 - Rec
MPEG with probability 93%

Eric Brosius - 14 - Credits
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 15 - Intro Cutscene
CDDA with probability 100%

Eric Brosius - 16 - Cutscene 2
CDDA with probability 87%

Eric Brosius - 17 - End Cutscene
CDDA with probability 100%

So, with the unfortunate exception of track 13, it finds it likely that they are lossless in origin. It's significantly less confident with track 1, but that may be because it's so short.

GOG.com: Could you check if there has been a mistake with track 13?

EDIT: Out of interest I took a deeper look into track 13 and it looks strange. There's an end to the spectrum around 16kHz, which could well be why auCDtect thinks that something is missing, but surprisingly there is again significant amount of data above 20kHz. I'm not really familiar at all with this sort of thing and I guess it could be aliasing of some sort, but it could also be that auCDtect is wrong. A lot of the title contains speech from the game that sounds highly processed to begin with (perhaps even mp3 compressed?) and it could be throwing it off.

So whats the difference between FLAC and MP3? I certainly can't hear a difference. Only difference I can see is it takes up a horrible amount of space.

FLAC is 'lossless' audio compression. This means that it keeps intact all the data that was originally in the source. You can't do compression miracles like this, so the files are large.

Lossy compression such as MP3 can reach manyfold compression without significant audible difference in quality. It does this by throwing out information that its psychoacoustic model deems irrelevant to your perception. Highest frequencies get cropped as so do silent sounds in near temporal vicinity of louder ones .. that sort of thing.

You might not (and probably won't) hear the difference, but a part of the signal is irrevocably lost. There are also compression artefacts added, comparable to the visual jitter that you can see if you look closely at sharp lines of a cartoon compressed in lossy JPEG format. This becomes relevant if you want to further process the audio by, say, converting it into another lossy format. Then you don't even have all the data to start with and end up spending effort and bits to preserve compression artefacts that were not supposed to be there in the first place. The result is a a bigger file with even lower quality result than if you had a clear source to begin with.

Also if you want to make an audio CD it will sound exactly like the MP3 - you won't have as good a copy as it originally was.

So it's more for people who want to be picky and awkward? haha

It's for people who want to make CD-quality CD's or otherwise choose their format and quality.

Loss of information, but. it's really only important if you want to reencode music into other formats, since every conversion usually has some information (i.e. quality) loss unless it is lossless like flac.

If you have high quality 320kbps mp3 files, you probably won't hear the difference even with good speakers or headphones. A good way to actually experience it is to compare an orchestra piece with good earphones - once with a 128kbps mp3 file and once with a flac file. You need to listen to instruments that don't play the main theme and are more in the background, it should be relatively easy to notice the difference. Personally, i cannot hear the difference between a high quality mp3 and flac.

If you're an average Joe, as in not an audiophile, MP3 is just suited for people like you. If encoded properly, there is no reason to go to FLAC if you're not the kind of guy that wants to hear music the way the sound engineers meant it to be heard, without any sort of coloration any distortion and with every sound bit perfectly played and replicated as it would in real life. People like me... It's really hard you know, equipment can be unearthly expensive... But hey, that's my goal.

There is also the aspect of keeping your ears practiced :) I remember once upon a time there was a discussion somewhere about how your ears become accustomed to hearing the music in a lossy way that it could impact your hearing. Not because of volume but because you become trained to not cope with the more in audible frequencies.

Regardless for me, I can (at times, depends on the music) hear the difference between lossless (ALAC/FLAC) and lossy (mp3/mp4) and because music is important to me I want to hear it in the best quality I can. Its like watching a TV show rip on my 50" plasma TV, I could watch an SD rip and it mightent look too bad but I'd rather watch an HD rip because I can tell the difference (my wife doesn't really notice the difference which Is why I am having a hard time selling her on Blu-ray).

Plus as was noted above, having it in lossless means I can do with it as I please without losing more quality. I tend to use ALAC (Apple Lossless) for home on the HiFi and sometimes on my iPhone, but I also tend to convert it to 256k mp4's for my iPhone or for Streaming to my phone over the internet.